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“Paulette Livers is the real thing—a blazing talent with a fierce intelligence
and a big heart, big enough to encompass a horrible tragedy and the inner life of
an entire community. She has written a brilliant and deeply compassionate study
of grief, violence, loneliness, and love. And her language sings.
This is a stunning debut —a perfect novel with deep implications for our own time.”—Lee Smith, author of Guests on Earth, Oral History, The Last Girls, and others

Photo by Sheli Hadari.

Paulette Livers* is the author of the novel Cementville which, with Joyce Carol Oates and Isabel Allende, was awarded the Elle magazine Lettres Prize and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award, Chicago Writers Association Fiction Book of the Year, and the Kentucky Literary Award. She grew up in Kentucky and has worked in Louisville, Atlanta, Boulder, and Chicago as a painter, illustrator, editor, and book designer for publishers around the country. Her lifelong love of writing and literature led her to join a writing group where she began to see her own writing as something to be shared beyond the privacy of her studio. Paulette has since received grants and fellowships from the Artcroft Foundation, Aspen Writers Foundation, the Bedell Foundation, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, MacDowell Colony, Ox-Bow Artist Residence, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for Creative Artists. The recipient of the Meyerson Prize for Fiction, Denver Women’s Press Club Emerging Writers Award, and Kentucky Women Writers Conference Gabehart Prize, her work has been shortlisted or won honorable mentions from Britain’s International Bridport Prize, Hunger Mountain, Red Hen Press, Writers@Work, and the Center for the American West. Her stories have appeared in the Southwest Review, The Dos Passos Review, Spring Gun Press, and elsewhere and can be heard at the audio-journal Bound Off. She is a frequent speaker and workshop facilitator at literary conferences around the country, teaches at Story Studio Chicago, and is Creative Director at Mighty Sword Studio, serving writers and publishers as a manuscript consultant, editor, and designer. Her work is represented by Michelle Brower of Zachary, Shuster, Harmsworth Literary. A member of the Pen America, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, Livers lives in Chicago.

*Livers is pronounced to rhyme with “divers”—not the bodily organ. Thank you!

Booksellers: A limited number of 1st Edition hardcovers of Cementville are still available. Please consider stocking Cementville in softcover. I’m happy to help you get great reads into the hands of your customers. We writers appreciate all you do on behalf of the literary community.

Book groups, perhaps the modest softcover price will encourage you to add Cementville to your reading list. I love meeting with book clubs, and have met with many around the country over the past year. Let me know if you’d like me to join you via Skype or in person if I’m in your area. Please see possible discussion questions here.

And dear readers, thank you for picking up my novel. I love hearing from you! Please tell your friends!

A limited number of 1st Edition hardcovers of Cementville are still available. In addition to the new softcover, Cementville can be downloaded as an E-Book for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Apple iBook formats.